For 50 years, DEL McCOURY music has defined bluegrass authenticity. With his sons in the band, McCoury conjures an authentic high lonesome sound that prompted Dirty Linen to declare, “There’s no voice in bluegrass quite as distinct.” He has been a keeper of the flame now for decades, touring relentlessly and releasing records at a furious pace since his 1968 debut. In 2010 he received a National Heritage Fellowship lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2011 he was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. Opening honors go to the virtuosic young pair CAHALEN MORRISON & ELI WEST, a self-proclaimed “new-old time duo” from Seattle, and Brooklyn’s SPIRIT FAMILY REUNION, whose joyfully raucous, communal music “blurs the line between past and present so thoroughly, and so deftly, that time feels irrelevant.”